All The World’s A Stage – Bringing Unified Emotions to your Barbershop Performance.
Every song has a story to be told. What makes a good story teller? It is someone who understands the story and puts the correct inflection in their voice and the correct emotion on their face. This seems like a simple enough statement until you consider the process of trying to create the right inflection and portray the correct emotion with a group of people from 4 to 140. Barbershop Quartets and Barbershop Choruses are tasked with doing this every time the pitch pipe blows.
For example, if you were reading to a small child and you want to keep their attention, just how expressive would you be? Very. But you might read the story differently than the person standing next to you. How do you unify this look? You plan. It may even be that there are some people in your group that don’t feel the story exactly as your artistic team has designed it, but what really matters is that everyone has the same plan. Different people call this process different things; I call it song mapping.
I define song mapping very much like it sounds. I take every turn, curve, and moment in the song and I map out what the emotions are that are being portrayed. Barbershop Ballads can be the most difficult for this type of process because many of them portray a wide range of emotions so you have to work to build up to the high energy or high anxiety moments and then build the reprieve so that your audience isn’t expected to hold that high energy throughout. You have to allow them to breath and move with you through the story.
What types of emotions are we talking about? Not just “happy”, “sad”, “angry”, and “glad”. Booooring!
So how about some positive emotions:
Friendly
Hopeful
Gentle
Jubilant
Surprised
Satisfied
Joyful
Negative Emotions :
Unstable
Sarcastic
Accusing
Boorish
Exhausted
Incredulous
Critical
Passionate Emotions:
Rapturous
Indulgent
Feverish
Uproarious
Breathless
Impetuous
Vivacious
High level Anxious Emotions:
Horrified
Astonished
Tragic
Hysterical
Vigorous
Ashamed
Take a moment and think about each word and find your facial expression or body language that would accompany such an emotion. Keeping in mind that during a Barbershop song, you can also use volume, voice inflection, and rhythmic interpretation to help you along the way.
If you are an artistic director for your barbershop chorus, then take the time to go through each song (preferably either with your director or have it approved by your director so that you are both on the same page) and find words that can adequately describe each line and angle of the story. Communicate those words to the chorus – write them on the music – use flash cards – shout them out as they are singing. Whatever works for you and your group. You will find that by having the same word in their head as the phrase is sung will allow the group to find their visual unity much easier than allowing them to find their own story in the song. Even if they portray it a little bit differently, if everyone has the same word in their head the effect is amazing.
If you are looking for tips for your barbershop quartet, then the 4 of you need to sit down as a group and define the song phrase by phrase, emotion by emotion. Again, even if you feel “rapturous” differently then someone else does, the fact that you are both thinking it will make a world of difference.
In short:
Define the story
Define each moment
Assign emotions to those moments
Practice what those emotions do to your face, body and voice
Set a plan – and stick with it – all of you.
Your audience will experience the journey with you and thank you for it. They may even forgive those pesky performance errors.
In fact, I bet they do.